It is easy to dismiss sports as entertainment.
People chase a puck, throw rocks down a sheet of ice, race on skis or skates, kick a ball across a field and then everyone goes home.
Yet nations continually invest enormous emotional energy in sporting events because something more is happening.
For a few hours, millions of people who disagree about almost everything else agree about who “we” are.
That word matters.
When Canadians watch an Olympic final, the athlete on the screen may come from Quebec, Alberta, Ontario, Nunavut or somewhere else entirely. Most viewers will never meet them. They may have nothing in common politically, professionally or culturally.
Yet when the Canadian flag appears beside the athlete’s name, strangers suddenly become representatives.
Sport creates imagined community in real time.
That was visible again during the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, where Canada finished with 21 medals, including five gold, seven silver and nine bronze. Seventy-five Canadian athletes returned home with medals, and Canadians celebrated achievements across speed skating, freestyle skiing, curling, hockey and other winter sports.
The men’s curling team won gold. Both the Canadian men’s and women’s hockey teams reached their gold-medal games, ultimately taking silver. Individual athletes produced moments that briefly became shared national conversations.
The value of these moments cannot be measured entirely by the medal count.
Sport creates common memory.
Older Canadians remember Paul Henderson in 1972.
Another generation remembers Sidney Crosby’s overtime goal in Vancouver in 2010.
People remember Olympic figure skating performances, speed skating races, curling championships and underdog victories that made entire rooms erupt simultaneously.
Even Canadians who normally pay little attention to sports can become intensely interested when someone is wearing the maple leaf.
Hockey occupies a particularly unusual place in this national identity. Parliament formally declared it Canada’s national winter sport in 1994, recognizing a relationship between hockey and Canadian culture that had already existed for generations.
But hockey is not important because a statute says so.
It matters because the game became embedded in ordinary Canadian life.
Outdoor rinks.
Small-town arenas.
Early-morning practices.
Parents carrying equipment bags.
Frozen ponds.
Junior teams.
Saturday-night broadcasts.
Arguments about trades.
Playoff beards.
Children pretending a meaningless shot against the garage door is the winning goal of an international championship.
Those rituals create continuity between generations.
Curling performs a similar role in another register. It is deeply rooted in communities across the country and combines elite international competition with thousands of ordinary Canadians playing in local clubs.
The Canadian Football League occupies its own niche. Soccer is growing. Basketball has deep Canadian roots and an increasingly significant Canadian presence internationally. Lacrosse is Canada’s official summer sport and carries much older Indigenous origins.
A broad Canadian nationalism should celebrate all of them.
Sport also demonstrates something important about diversity.
A national team does not require everyone to share the same ancestry, language, religion or hometown.
It asks them to share a jersey.
That is civic nationalism distilled to its simplest form.
Different Canadians become one team without becoming identical.
There are reasonable criticisms of sports culture. Youth sports can become too expensive. Hockey in particular has faced serious questions about accessibility, inclusion and institutional culture. Governments should be careful about public spending on professional sporting facilities, and nationalism should never become an excuse for abusive behaviour toward athletes or opponents.
None of that changes the fact that shared rituals are important.
Modern societies are increasingly fragmented. People consume different media, live inside different online communities and often interact socially with people who think like them.
National sporting events provide rare moments when Canadians participate in the same experience simultaneously.
You hear someone cheering from another apartment.
A stranger starts talking to you about the score.
A restaurant erupts after a goal.
An entire country suddenly remembers it has something in common.
There are grander expressions of nationalism.
Parliament.
The military.
National monuments.
Constitutional institutions.
But perhaps countries also need ordinary things that allow people to enjoy belonging to them.
Sometimes Canadian nationalism is a serious discussion about sovereignty.
Sometimes it is thirty million people shouting at a television because a puck crossed a line.
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